This gay German artist was the template for Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post work

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People walk along main street in Stockbridge, Mass. on Dec. 3, 2017. The town re-creates scenes from the Norman Rockwell painting 'Home For Christmas (Stockbridge Main Street At Christmas)'. The rural Massachusetts town of Stockbridge celebrates the holiday season with caroling, concerts and culminates with a re-creation of the iconic Rockwell painting from 1967. CJ GUNTHER, EPA-EFE

A passerby looks into the window of a car on main street in Stockbridge, Mass. The car with a Christmas tree on top is part of the tradition to re-create the Norman Rockwell painting of 1967. CJ GUNTHER, EPA-EFE

Carolers sing outside the Red Lion Inn in downtown Stockbridge, Mass. on Dec. 2, 2017. The rural Massachusetts town of Stockbridge celebrates the holiday season with caroling, concerts and culminates with a conversion of Main Street into a re-creation of a scene from a Norman Rockwell painting from 1967. CJ GUNTHER, EPA-EFE

When you think of the Saturday Evening Post you think of those ultra-Americana covers by Norman Rockwell, but it was a gay, German-born artist named J.C. Leyendecker who set the magazine's apple-pie tone, a tone then adopted by Rockwell.

Ripoff? No, says Steve Harman, the Post's technology director. But if you look at the two artists' Post covers, "you can see how Leyendecker influenced Rockwell's style."

The comparison is now a mouse click away. The magazine last month put its entire archive online.

The archive is enormous; it's a half million pages. The magazine goes back to 1821 and for most of its life was a weekly. Now it publishes six times a year. Its offices, for the first century and a half in Philadelphia, were moved to Indianapolis in 1971 after the magazine, in distress, was bought by Indianapolis businessman and one-time city-council president Beurt SerVaas. SerVaas died in 2014 at age 94. His daughter Joan SerVaas runs the magazine.

In its heyday, the Post had 6 million subscribers and published fiction by literary big hitters like Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, Agatha Christie, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, C. S. Forester, Kurt Vonnegut, Sinclair Lewis, William Saroyan and John Steinbeck.

Their stories are available in the archive, as is the piece from March 1963 by a sportswriter named Frank Graham, Jr. Graham was no literary lion but his story, "The Story of a College Football Fix," may have been the Post's all-time most memorable. It alleged that athletic officials from the universities of Georgia and Alabama conspired to fix the outcome of a game. There followed a multi-million dollar defamation suit, which the magazine lost.

The Post had been losing readers steadily, and six years after the Graham debacle it briefly ceased publishing. That's when SerVaas bought it, moved it to Indianapolis and resumed its publication.

Today it has about 300,000 subscribers and publishes general interest magazine features. The current issue has a motorcycle travel story, a first-person remembrance of Mister Rogers and a Q&A with Reba McEntire.

Norman Rockwell stopped illustrating Post covers in 1963 but 15 years later was still, according to his New York Times obituary, "the artist whose nostalgic evocations of small town America appeared on hundreds of Saturday Evening Post covers."

Leyendecker, who died in 1951, just eight years after his last Post cover, was "a commercial artist whose magazine covers and illustrations for men's clothing advertisements made him one of the most popular painters in America."

But Leyendecker ended up with more Post covers than Rockwell, or anyone else. He had 323. When Rockwell got to 322 he could have kept going but said "no more" out of respect for Leyendecker, Harman said.

Leyendecker was best known for his advertising illustrations for Arrow Collars and Shirts, among other men's clothing companies. His model for the handsome guy that became known as "the Arrow Collar man," was Charles Beach, Leyendecker's companion of 49 years, according to a history of Leyendecker published online by the Haggin Museum. The Haggin, in Stockton, Ca., has the world's largest collection of Leyendecker's paintings.

Leyendecker had been a celebrity. He built a mansion outside New York City where he threw big parties and hosted artist salons.

But by the time he died, of a heart attack in 1951 at age 77, his star had faded. He ran low on money as illustration gave way to photography.

Five people came to his funeral, according to a story in the Saturday Evening Post. One of them was Norman Rockwell.

Contact Star reporter Will Higgins at 317-444-6043. Follow him on Twitter @WillRHiggins.